The Fine Art of Staying Hydrated

Keeping Drinks Lined Up for Elite Marathoners Is an Involved Process—One That Includes Decorating Like Kindergarteners

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A row of finished water bottles.
Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal

By

Joshua Robinson

November 7, 2011

Less than 24 hours before the ING New York City Marathon, most of the race's elite runners were busy making a mess in Room 4449 of the midtown Hilton. All afternoon, men and women at the top of their sport trickled in to fiddle with pipe cleaners, pom poms, stickers, glue, leopard-print tape and feathers, all under the supervision of a volunteer who used to teach first grade.

By the time they were done, the floor was strewn with fuzz, tinsel and ribbon, like a crime scene in a toy store.

The runners were getting in touch with their inner 6-year-olds in one of the marathon's most obscure rituals: personalizing their fluid bottles. With only a split-second to pick out their drinks at every station on race day, they doll them up to recognize them instantly. The more flamboyant the better.

"It's strange, but it lessens the tension a little bit, because everyone's just goofing off," said Bobby Curtis, who had foam alligators dangling from pipe cleaners on his bottles Sunday. "It looks like we're in kindergarten."

The great Catherine Ndereba has been known to tape a picture of her daughter to every bottle to give her a lift at every station. In the same spirit, Sarah Porter designed her bottles to boost her morale through the grueling race.

Porter, however, does not have children. Instead, she designed elaborate faces on her bottles and gave them each a name. They had feathers for hair and pipe cleaners for mouths. The bottle she named Eduardo wore a grin and a handlebar mustache. The one she called Dolly Parton had other distinguishing features—a pair of suggestive fuzzy pom poms.

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Her finished product.
Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal

"I think it's smart to have them smile at me," Porter said.

Jaouad Gharib of Morocco went with a more pragmatic approach, favored by most of the African runners. Using tape and pipe cleaners in the colors of his country's flag, he fashioned a simple loop over the top of the bottle to make it easier to grab on the fly—the condensation makes bottles notoriously slippery.

There are only two rules for the decorations: They may not be more than 12 inches tall and each bottle must be clearly inscribed with the athlete's bib number and the station the bottle is for.

But arts and crafts are only a small part of the serious business of elite runners' fluids.

In New York, the whole operation has been steadily refined for over a decade by Joe Tringali, who brings the same fierce attention to detail that he uses in his day job as Department Manager for Corporate Security for ConEdison. He can remember the days when bottles would be haphazardly laid out on a table by the course, leaving runners to fight past the television motorcycle and hope they grabbed the right one. Now, those look like the savage dark ages.

With the help of 28 volunteers—most of them ConEdison employees—and the New York Road Runners, Tringali has turned the elite fluids operation into a well-oiled machine, admired by marathons all over the world. And if none of the 40 men and 40 women who had bottles at the fluid stations are talking about them after the race, then he knows he has done his job right.

"We have 80 bottles times seven stations," Tringali said. "That's 560 bottles we're handling. And we can't have one mistake."

At every station, each bottle has an assigned spot on one of 10 tables. They are deliberately laid out in a zigzag pattern, because Tringali believes it reduces the temptation to cheat—one of the myriad tiny insights he has had in years of watching athletes whisk their drinks away.

"We've had instances in the past where an athlete, say, has the first bottle on a table and conveniently keeps his hand on the table and knocks over all the other bottles," he said. "That stuff has happened and we want to eliminate anyone having an unfair advantage."

In case an athlete does try something funny, every volunteer is armed with a digital camera. But it is unlikely a runner would have any use for someone else's drink, since every athlete personalizes what goes inside as much as the outside.

On Saturday, some filled them with nothing more than water or Gatorade, while taping a pouch of gel to the side. Others put their faith in a sports cocktail of their own invention. Jen Houck turned into an energy drink mixologist on as she filled her bright orange bottles with water, Gatorade, electrolyte tablets and salts in various carefully measured concentrations for different points in the race.

Johanna Ottosson, a vegan marathoner, brought specialty energy products from New Zealand for most of her bottles. Then she filled the last two with flat Coca-Cola.

Once the bottles are ready, Tringali makes sure they are handled by as few people as possible. At the Hilton, only he and his assistant, Jim Gilday, were allowed to organize them and place them in plastic crates.

The point is to be able to prove a chain of custody, in case of a complaint by an athlete or worse, a positive drug test.

So the truck loaded with fluid station supplies—the tables, signage and the 14 crates of bottles—stayed locked in a secure location overnight until it was driven to the 5-kilometer mark, deep in Brooklyn, before dawn on Sunday. Escorted by a police car, it then flew up the course. By 9:30 it was in Harlem, making its final delivery.

When it comes to timing, nothing is left to chance. At the 36-kilometer station, they were expecting the first of the elite women to arrive at 11:10:36 a.m. And that late in the race, the fastest men would not be far behind.

At precisely 11:10, the first elite woman, Mary Keitany, turned the corner of 120th Street onto 5th Avenue. Right on schedule. She grabbed her bottle cleanly, without breaking stride, and was off. (volunteers aren't allowed to hand the bottles to the runners.)

Thirteen minutes later, it was time for the big turnaround. In one burst of activity, Hill and his team gathered up the remaining women's bottles and replaced them with the men's drinks, which were under their corresponding tables. The women's bottles wound up grouped on two extra tables at the end.

The whole process took less than two minutes.

It was 11:28 when the escort vehicles came into view, leading Geoffrey Mutai and the front pack. One by one, they snatched up the bottles. The runners took one quick slug then flung the bottle aside.

So it went for about half an hour. Grab. Drink. Toss. Grab. Drink. Toss.

A few loose pipe cleaners sat in the street, unstuck from their bottles, as evidence that the elites had been through—and that they were no longer thirsty.

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